![]() Some periodicals are great examples of this, too - The New Yorker, for instance, has clean typographic layouts that focus on the body of text for a given article, and sprinkle in relatively dsitractionless column ads and cartoon panels. You are given text, you read that text - no fuss. The traditional book format is a fine example of this. When we want to read something, we want the experience to be distraction-free. ![]() It is also available on Android, and can be accessed through various apps on desktop computers like ReadKit (subscription required). Instapaper is now a $4.99 iOS app with an optional $1.00/month subscription for advanced features such as full-text search, API hook-up with third-party apps, better Kindle article integration (like higher Kindle article limits and a “Send to Kindle” bookmarklet), and the ability to disable ads on the site. Now, Instapaper has switched ownership - Marco sold Instapaper to Betaworks in April 2013 - and app prices/have changed. Instapaper as an app launched at the commencement of the Apple App Store with two options: one Pro version at $10, another free version with a limitation on the number of articles a user could save. Humbly founded by Marco Arment in 2008 to scratch his itch for an easier way to save and read articles while commuting, Instapaper never received any rounds of investment and was completely self-funded. Today, Pocket is available for free on iOS, Android, and BlackBerry OS, as well as multiple web browsers (with official, smart extensions) and on desktop OSes. To put all that money to use, I suppose Read It Later needed to be renamed Pocket (which happened in 2012) to shed its one-trick name to accommodate a larger spread of users by aiming to be the premier Internet collection service. In its more mature days, Read It Later earned venture capital investments) of $2.5 million in 2011, and in 2012, an additional round of $5.0 million. It ran alonside Instapaper in the early days as an alternative once it had its app and syncing service up and running. Originally intended only for desktop computers (as a browser extension for Firefox), Read It Later was first started in August 2007 by Nathan Weiner. The full scorecard is located at the tail-end of this evaluation. These are weighted in no particular order, with several evaluated subjectively on a scale of Poor, Okay, Good, Great, and Excellent, other binarily as Yes/No. ![]() I've grouped these evaluations into the following: But there are several other considerations that can be included as well - expectations of a multi-platform user, design philosophies of servicing websites and apps in 2013, the speed and ease of use of a product. Obviously both of these services are self-referential for the read later service, and so they've helped shape what a service like this should look like (in addition to how it should function). What I hope to do with this evaluation is score each service on several integral components of what a read later service should ideally comprise. Today, the read-it-later economy is strong, and even traditional bookmarking/note-taking services like Delicious and Evernote have attempted to enter it. Both have evolved into more realized products of their original visions, and have refined their services and ecosystems. Pocket (formerly known as Read It Later) started life as a single-platform Firefox extension that didn't do much beyond saving articles for later (without device sync) Instapaper, a bookmarklet and text parser for the iPhone (which had just debuted), focused on parsing article text and having a synchronized list between platforms (the app launched when the App Store did in 2008). So, in the year of the iPhone, this whole "read it later" thing began. As technology advanced, services like Yahoo's Delicious caught on to the idea of enabling pages on the Internet to be saved server-side, therefore being accessible wherever you could reach the bookmarking website.īut circa 2007, in the booming age of mobile devices and the changing behaviors of readers, bookmarking a full web page and loading it up on the train into work isn't as convenient a reading experience as it could have been. For a long while, bookmarking was tied to client-side storage in the application, and could only be accessed at a user's computer. Bookmarking has been part of Internet browsing since nearly the beginning of the browser.
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